May Day

Today we enjoyed the lovely holiday of May Day. Even though it was a holiday we still had English with the ladies at 8am since we’re giving them off on Friday instead. We had about 5 ladies come today. We had a quiz on the buildings and created sentences using each new vocabulary word. We also played Bananagrams at the end. Bertha is my Bananagrams prodigy! She is so wonderful at spelling!

We let them leave at 9:30 instead of doing our usual 8-10 since we felt bad for asking them to come on a holiday.

The rest of our day was spent doing odd jobs. We continued making lists of things we want to accomplish before we leave, and we tried taking some self-pictures to give as gifts—which was a fun adventure…

Then we walked up to the store where there’s an ATM and got some fresh fruit at the wonderful fruit stand at the Puma gas station.

That is something I’m going to miss a lot—being able to get fresh fruits and vegetables so easily and for so cheap. Right here at the guest house or on campus we can also pick fruit right off the trees. We were so impressed with our fruit and veg collected that we took pictures of everything we’ve gotten from the market or from the trees this week. We had a cabbage, green peppers, onions, tomatoes, oranges, mandarin oranges, tangerines, lemons, pears, apples, a papaya, avocados and a pineapple.

While we were walking back from the fruit stand we were still fairly close to the Great East Road when we heard a lot of shouting and commotion. Then we saw a guy sprinting down the road that we just turned on to. Another guy starting chasing him and shouting something. Then a nearby vehicle sped up really quickly to chase the man that was running away. He jumped out of his car and some people standing nearby helped detain the man. It turned out that this guy running away had stolen something from the other man and was trying to make an escape. When they captured him they whipped out some handcuffs and started leading him back in the direction they came from, all the while slapping and hitting the thief and yelling at him. We have no idea where the handcuffs came from or what he stole but it was all a little scary. We were standing right in the middle of all this as it was happening.

This afternoon we headed over campus to deliver biscuits to the ladies. Dee gives them biscuits each week to give to their children and usually we hand them out in class but we keep forgetting this week. So we decided to deliver them right to their homes. I also wanted to take a picture of Bertha’s family since the last pictures I took of them did not turn out well. Sadly, we also passed out notecards to each family with our “last days” dates on them; last day for preschool, tutoring, and English as well as the days we are planning to do a little farewell party. I cannot believe I just typed that. It seemed so surreal telling the ladies as well. When we told Sarah she just looked so sad and said that this was “not good” and that her heart felt like it was breaking. That made me want to start crying right then and there. We told her we couldn’t let ourselves be sad about it now since we still have 2 weeks left.

It was a really hot day today! It reminds me of how hot it was when we first arrived. When we were on campus I was expecting some of the kids to be around and figured I’d play with them for a while but campus was pretty quiet…everyone was playing in the shade or inside.

We did other productive things like get tomorrow’s worksheets printed off, made a birthday card for Mrs. Sargent, whose birthday is tomorrow, and worked on the Zambia PowerPoint some more.

At 4:15 we headed over for volleyball, with a quick stop at Anne’s to give her our old PB jars. She likes to use them to put sugar and salt etc.

Volleyball was pretty quick today because we left at 5 for a surprise get together at the guest house for Mrs. Sargent’s birthday. Nathan decorated the living room with birthday banners and balloons and Pastor Sargent ordered pizza and a cake. It was a fun evening. We played Nathan’s new came called Telestrations. It was like telephone Pictionary.

The rest of the evening was spent in the usual way, blogging and chatting on Facebook with friends.